Features

Biteback, March 25

What's with the BBC's obssession with Engelbert Humperdink? (Ethan Miller)

T
he Booker, the Turner and the Orange are, I hear, about to be joined by a
significant new prize: the Genesis. Worth £25,000 to the winner, the award
will go to an outstanding mentor of burgeoning artistic talent.

It makes a change from awards for what sometimes is really a lifetime
achievement. Julian Barnes’s Booker winner last year, The Sense of an
Ending, was neither the best novel of 2011 nor even his finest book. And
while I have sympathy and respect for the Orange, which is of course for
women writers only, I’m not sure the female sex needs encouraging to write
or read. Women novelists dominate the bestseller charts.

The Genesis prize is the baby of John Studzinski, an American-born finance
whiz, now based in Britain, who is known for his love of music and art and
as a philanthropist. Studz, as he is widely called, set up